Meeting of the Parliament (Hybrid) 08 March 2022
In last week’s members’ business debate on international women’s day, I spoke of the situation in Ukraine and in Afghanistan, and the impact that conflict has on women. My thoughts and solidarity are very much with the people of Ukraine today. Let us also remember women and girls around the world who face conflict, injustice and poverty every day.
I also take this opportunity to thank Baroness Helena Kennedy QC for the work of the misogyny and criminal justice in Scotland working group and its published report. We will look at the report in much more detail, but I hope that we are able to end the abuses that degrade women’s lives.
Today, I would like to focus on the issues that are facing women in modern Scotland, and on how we can break the bias to improve women’s health, finances and representation in politics.
The stigma and lack of understanding surrounding women’s reproductive health leaves millions of women suffering pain and shame every year. Biases that lead people to believe that debilitating period pain is normal or that there is something embarrassing about cervical screenings can also have long-term consequences.
Despite an estimated 1.5 million women in the United Kingdom being affected by endometriosis, too many are led to believe that the debilitating symptoms are something that they must just put up with. Since I started speaking out about endometriosis, I have heard from many women in Shetland about how it has impacted their lives, relationships, education and work. One woman told me that it took 15 years—15 years!—to get a diagnosis. It would be interesting to know whether a similar painful condition that affected as many men would take an average of eight and a half years to diagnose.
Misconceptions and misogyny need addressing. Medical staff need to learn how to listen to what women are saying when they describe what is happening to their body. Data from Jo’s Cervical Cancer Trust reveal that one in three do not attend their cervical screening appointment when invited. Every year, 220,000 women and people with a cervix are told that they have cervical changes, and many more receive a diagnosis of human papillomavirus. Those receiving the news are often confused, ashamed and scared.
Screening numbers have fallen across Scotland, which is likely due to the pandemic. It is really important that those who are eligible have the screening and keep it up to date. It must be scary to hear the news that there have been cervical cell changes, but support and treatment are available. We must break the bias that tells people that reproductive health is something that is not to be talked about. Screening saves lives. No barrier should prevent anyone from being proactive about their health, especially not the feeling of shame after diagnosis.
I turn to finances. We know that women are more likely to be paid less, to work in more insecure jobs and to take on the bigger share of caring—paid and unpaid—and domestic chores. Those inequalities have been exacerbated by policies that have had consequences that were either not foreseen or were ignored by those making them at the time.
I am a member of the cross-party group on women against state pension inequality. Changes that were made in 1995 later left many women facing a longer-than-anticipated wait to receive their state pension. Many were left unaware at the time of the initial announcements and the subsequent changes. Many found out only when they neared what they thought would be the end of their working life and were shocked to discover that they would not get their pension at 60 after all. It might have been the right thing to have the same state pension age for everyone in a modern economy, but some of the women affected did not have the same work opportunities that have been open to later generations.
We should not have a situation in which women are forced to choose between heating and eating because of when they were born. Women of pensionable age living alone are one of the demographics most at risk of fuel poverty, and the islands have some of the highest levels of fuel poverty in the country. We need a better understanding of the gender impacts of policies, so that such devastating negative impacts do not happen again.
It is a privilege to be one of the women elected to the Scottish Parliament and also to be Shetland’s first female MSP. The 2021 election results mean that women now account for 45 per cent of MSPs, which is a record number. However, at local authority level, women account for just 29 per cent of elected officials.
I have spoken to women who say that they would not stand for elected office because of the toxic nature of social media. We must strive to have many more women from all parties elected.
What we wear, how we do our hair, how we look and how we sound are often commented on more than the ideas that we bring to debates. We need to break the bias against women candidates and politicians. Having more women in politics would bring wider understanding of society to our discussions and better representation of the people who put us here.
Finally, I thank the men who are in the chamber. I am sure that we will hear more about men’s violence against women during the debate and it is only through men listening, learning and changing their behaviour that men’s violence against women will be addressed. Scottish Liberal Democrats have been calling for the establishment of a commission to end gender-based violence. We need a more socially equal society to break the bias against women.